“We’ve always been a blender band, we’ve always experimented early and often,” Chris “OJ” Ojeda, vocalist and guitarist for West Virginia metal squad Byzantine, tells Apple Music. On the band’s seventh album, Harbingers, Ojeda and his bandmates—guitarist Brian Henderson, drummer Matt Bowles, new bassist Ryan Postlethwait, and returning guitarist Tony Rohrbough (who left in 2013 and rejoined in 2025)—tried to recapture some of the youthful energy they brought to their 2004 debut, The Fundamental Component and its 2005 follow-up …And They Shall Take Up Serpents. “I feel like that mixture made our songwriting pretty bombastic on this one. If any album in our discography is going to get new fans fired up, this one might be it.” Lyrically, Ojeda explored the idea of change on Harbingers. “Harbinger means one who ushers in great change,” he says. “It’s been eight years since our last album, and a lot of things have changed in our lives. We always dabbled in Byzantine history with Emperor Constantine and Emperor Justinian, but this time we’re focusing on Irene, the only maternal ruler they ever had. That’s another big change.” Below, he comments on each track. "Consequentia" “When we had pretty much wrapped up the writing for this album, I felt like we didn’t have the right opener. With a couple of our albums, we’ve just kicked the door open with a fast one, but I wanted this album to feel like a parabola or a sine wave—start in first gear and come up. Brian said he had a little demo that might fit in, and it was perfect. Brian felt like it had an Opeth Watershed vibe, which I’m all about. Luckily, it ends on the same note that the first full track begins on, so we segued them together.” “A Place We Cannot Go” “This song has a pretty deep meaning for me. I have three children—two of them are really young, but they’re all in school. This song tackles the topic of mass shootings in America, and specifically mass shootings in schools. I’ve had to have the talk with my kids, and it’s gut-wrenching. People my age never had to fucking worry about that. During COVID, I had too much time on my hands, and I started researching mass shootings. That got me to the point where I felt like I needed to write a song about it.” “Floating Chrysanthema” “With AI being so prevalent in our lives, I was reading stories about bands getting the shit kicked out of them [online] for having AI art and using AI to write their songs. I was like, ‘We need a song about AI becoming sentient and enslaving us and making us play music for them.’ I’ve had the term ‘floating chrysanthema’ in my notes for a couple of years. It comes from World War II, when Japan was doing a lot of kamikaze bombings. The Japanese admiral said he wanted to see the seas littered with heroes like floating chrysanthema. I just tied that in with the sentient AI theme.” “The Clockmaker’s Intention” “We’ve got a new band member, Ryan Postlethwait, and he’s a very prolific songwriter. He helped me write this song and ‘Floating.’ This one is about one of my favorite podcasts, which came out in 2017. It’s called S-Town, which stands for ‘Shit Town.’ It’s about this really odd, redneck homosexual guy in a small town in Alabama. He contacts the folks at This American Life about an alleged murder in his town and asks them to investigate. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I’ll say it’s the only podcast I’ve ever listened to where I openly wept at how it turns out.” “Riddance” “We needed something fast, like Gothenburg-style Swedish metal. So, I wrote this tune and thought our producer, Peter Wichers from Soilwork, would love it. I brought it to him, and he was like, ‘All right, this is like beginner Swedish metal.’ So, he helped me get it to the point where it had some gas. It’s about the Ma’Nene in Indonesia, which is this festival where the living will dig up their dead, dress them, and drink with them. It’s the craziest shit. I also name-drop all four original members of Meshuggah in the lyrics.” “Harbinger” “I started this band 25 years ago with my good friend Tony Rohrbough. His style of playing and songwriting was instrumental in us developing a sound. Then we broke up, and he hasn’t been in the band for about 12 years. We decided to bring him back, but we love his replacement so much that we kept them both. Now, for the first time, we’re a five-piece. And Tony does a guest guitar solo on this song. It’s about how our world is ruled by billionaires and oligarchs.” “The Unobtainable Sleep” “We have a friend from deep inside Russia. He lives almost in Siberia. He contacted me 10 years ago, when he was a kid. His name is Andrey Gadzhibalaev, and he is an absolute wonder of a talent. We specifically wrote a solo section for him on this song. It’s the longest solo section on the album. The lyrics don’t really mean anything. We just thought the riffs were meaty and the song title was cool. The main thing was: We had to get Andrey on the album. He sent back a really panty-dropper.” “Kobayashi Maru” “This is another one that Ryan wrote. I always loved the term ‘Kobayashi Maru,’ which comes from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. It essentially means a no-win scenario. It was a test made by the Starfleet to test their cadets. We’ve got seven albums now, and on every one I write a song about aliens taking us over. I’m a giant fan of the ‘we’re from alien DNA’ conspiracy. I think it’s fun as shit, and it doesn’t hurt anybody. So, this is our newest installment of the aliens being really upset with how we turned out.” “Irene” “This is about Irene of Athens, who is depicted on the album cover by a wonderful local artist here in Charleston named Ashley Hoey. We wanted to end the album in a lower gear, like we started it. This song has more of a Mastodon or maybe Metallica Load-era vibe, so we thought it was a good one to end on. It’s about Byzantine history, so it was a fun one to write, and Brian Henderson came up with a fantastic outro solo.”